If Others want to see
It can be had on Window Panes
Some Hours in the Day.
But not for Compensation—
It holds as large a Glow
To Squirrel in the Himmaleh
Precisely, as to you.
Emily Dickinson
Wednesday was the longest night of the year or as I prefer to call it, the shortest day. I spent most of it inside with two colds (one per nostril). You see I had this cold and when it was almost gone another came and both seem to get along just fine in the company of my body. It was a bad day to stay inside as the sun was out and I could have worked in the garden. Rosemary did and I could see her being followed wherever she went by her cat Casi-Casi.
In this latest sequence blog of running pictures to illustrate Emily Dickinson poems I knew that there was surely one poem on light and it is one of my favourites. It begins with: There is a certain slant of light which I have already illustrated here. But I found another that fits better with the picture of Madeleine Morris I took a summer long ago.
In this digital age of photography photographers are able to edit the pictures they do not like. These pictures go to a digital oblivion where their zero and one pixels join the cloud of emptiness which of late we suspect is occupied by a molasses-like substance predicted by a gentleman called Jack Higgs.
We who still shoot film tend to keep everything in our files even though they occupy a physical space, and in my case, in my basement nmetal file cabinets.
I knew that there was one picture of Madeleine taken with fast Ektachrome which I pushed in processing from 800 to 1600 IS0 but I forgot to tell my Nikon about. The slide is very overexposed. I like it and I think that it, and she, and Dickinson’s poem fit just about perfect.